by Tim Brunson, PhD

There is a trend in the healing professions that dogmatically mandates a naturalistic approach. It assumes that a person will always move toward a more healthy state, provided that the causes can be split from the symptoms. In the medical arena, this means that too often physicians focus only on eliminating the symptoms and trusting that their patient will naturally return to health. This sick-care approach – versus a health care approach – fails more often than they would like to admit. On the psychotherapy side of the fence, this same approach has been echoed in various schools of psychology. In fact, within the realm of hypnotherapy I see this as the major methodology preached by those who follow Ericksonian hypnosis and solution-oriented hypnosis, its offshoot. The premise here is that the subconscious mind is perfectly capable of finding a solution on its own, although apparently the subconscious mind is what caused the problem initially.

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